Electronic devices, including portable electronic devices, have gained widespread use and can provide a variety of functions including, for example, telephonic, electronic messaging and other personal information manager (PIM) application functions. Portable electronic devices can include several types of devices including mobile stations such as simple cellular telephones, smart telephones, wireless PDAs, and laptop computers with wireless 802.11 or Bluetooth capabilities. These devices run on a wide variety of networks from data-only networks such as Mobitex and DataTAC to complex voice and data networks such as GSM/GPRS, CDMA, EDGE, UMTS and CDMA2000 networks.
Devices such as PDAs or smart telephones are generally intended for handheld use and easy portability. Smaller devices are generally desirable for portability. A touch screen input/output device is particularly useful on such handheld devices as such handheld devices are small and are therefore limited in space available for user input and output devices. Further, the screen content on the touch screen devices can be modified depending on the functions and operations being performed.
Touch screen devices are constructed of a display, such as a liquid crystal display, with a touch-sensitive overlay. These input/output devices suffer from inherent disadvantages relating to user interaction and response, however. In particular, such touch screen devices fail to provide a user-desirable tactile quality for positively indicating input, providing a poor user-experience. For example, audio output and vibrational devices do not provide a desirable tactile quality.
Improvements in touch screen devices are therefore desirable.